The page.width and page.height options are fairly self-explanatory. I am using 7.5in x 9in to roughly conform to major computer book publisher requirements.

The initial-page-number option was one of many attempts that I made to get chapters to always start on the "recto" (right) page. That does not actually work, so I remove it and leave a TODO comment to hopefully solve that some day.

The remaining changes that I applied to get PDF generation in decent shape were to docbook-xsl/fo.xsl. I was quite worried about those changes. I know that the git-scribe source includes the docbook-xsl (not just this one file) and I was worried that I had been making changes directly to the docbook fo.xsl file. Happily that is stored in docbook-xsl/fo/fo.xsl. The docbook-xsl/fo.xsl file is explicitly called in do_pdf to load in local, git-scribe specific changes to the docbook defaults. I had been worried about those changes for almost a month now and it turns out that I made them in exactly the right place!

Anyhow, the first change that I made to docbook/fo.xsl was an ultimately failed attempt to get syntax highlighting working:

That overrides the default (empty) cover page XSL template with an actual image. In there, I follow the git-scribe convention of naming the image images/cover.jpg. This requires me to include the cover of my book in the images directory of my working git-scribe directory:

Of course, it wasn't as easy as adding 10 lines of XSLT "code" to get the cover image included. I also had to define my own "page master", which describes special page layout to be used for specific pages:

Ultimately, however, it is worth the trouble. Without it, alt-tabbing displays a generic PDF icon and systray icons are similarly generic. With a cover image, the reader is treated to a visual feast:

So my remaining TODOs in git-scribe are to get source code highlighting working in PDF and to start all chapters on the recto page. Both are nice-to-haves, but I can live without them. My hope is that someone smarter than I can figure those out by the time I am ready for my next book.